


You Took a Shot, It Took You Down

by ShadowsLament



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-19
Updated: 2016-03-19
Packaged: 2018-05-27 13:56:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6287290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShadowsLament/pseuds/ShadowsLament
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A slightly altered reality in which Malcolm's obsessions have cost him the bulk of his funds and other assets, leaving the rest of his small, chosen family to fall back on their particular skill sets to make quick money. Ethan has a couple of options: his guns or his fists. With Vanessa, he heads out to the back alleys, the underground clubs, all the dark places where a man might be willing to bet against him in a fight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Took a Shot, It Took You Down

He was a better shot than most, and truth was, he loved the weight of a gun, the way it fit to his palm like one or the other was made for it. But using his hands, he liked that better. Not his claws, when the moon splayed sins across his back, but his knuckles, where tightened skin paled and pulled thin over bone, where that skin sometimes split and seeped blood.

A mess of spectators formed a wide, loose circle he stood dead-center inside, waiting for the other fighters to quit pissing themselves and decide on which of them stepped in to face him. That line of shuffling bodies wasn’t much as boundary markers went, but it was enough to ensure every punch thrown on the right side of it was a battle-bred strategy, a controlled explosion of encouraged violence that was potent, if not quite on the level with Vanessa’s brand of intoxicating. 

She was there, he knew it, could smell her in every breath he took, her scent a spray of night-blooming flowers with saber-sharp petals that sliced through sweat and smoke to score her name into the sinew that held him together.

That particular series of letters was carved so deep now, he moved and the raised edges scraped against raw nerve endings. Pleasure grazed teeth down his stomach when he twisted in his sleep, bit at his hip when he walked, all but swallowed him whole when he shoved back against the nearest closed door and finally fucked into the tight fist of his hand. The one constant in those desperate moments was her name: riding his tongue, pressing against his teeth, clenched shut to contain the growl scratching at his throat.

The wind shifted with the restless crowd as he sought her out. Met her eyes, hot as a bullet out of the barrel. She’d watched him from the benches that first day too, a picture of prim and proper, with buttons beneath lace nearly to her chin. Didn’t take a second look to see it for a lie, one worn closer than a second skin. He figured they were all entitled to their disguises, and he kept on figuring as much until that ramshackle bar and the cool culture of her voice. 

There’d been a sorry slab of knotted wood between them, a glass within easy reach containing a mouthful of liquor that dulled not a single fucking thing. If his count was true, maybe a second or two had passed before it sunk bone-deep: the unshakeable desire to strip her of prim, of proper, layer by layer. Nails or tongue, the means didn’t matter, he wanted the truth of her bared. A damn sight more than bullets or cloud cover, he needed to taste consent on her lips, to enfold her in his own name.  

And that wanting, that _needing_ hummed in him still. With a blanket of dawn’s light tucked tight round their shoulders and her fingers in his hair, pushing it back, back behind his ear, or drawing it forward to use the tips as a thin-bristled brush against the stubbled canvas of his cheek, in that hush it was soft and sweet, a lullaby. When she stood toe to toe with him, a kind of storm-licked fury darkening her eyes, when all that he was strained towards her, towards the violence of mutual surrender, it was a pounding drum, a piercing war cry.

The tone and tune was ever changing. All his life, he’d never heard anything like it.

Just then, as he shifted his weight back on the heel of his right boot, the hum was a bow drawn slow over strings, it was a growl of thunder, a roughening ride of deep notes that set its pace to the metronomic tick, tick, ticking of the pocket watch pressed like a tattoo against his ribs. The evening had fallen cold, a chill that crept closer by the second, stirring up a restlessness that stretched like a web between them and tugged at the stern corner of her mouth.

She looked over to where the other fighters met and, narrow-eyed, followed the path of the coin arcing up sky-high between two of them, a tumble of silver and tarnish that landed a light slap on an upturned palm. The one with pockmarks from ear to jaw, his shoulders lowered like a sigh.

Vanessa smiled, small, so only he’d notice the cinder shift of her lips.

Settled in a loose stance, mist licked all the way up his forearms to the roll of cloth folded tight where his elbows bent. Across the way, his unwilling partner in the fight tore out of a jacket that was scarcely more than too-short sleeves and a litter of stains on the lapel, pitching the balled up material to the ground. The man stepped forward, huffing, his breath like milk left to curdle, spoiling the air.

His nose folded towards the bridge, nostrils flaring. 

There was a show of neck and knuckle cracking, four strides taken in one direction, the path retraced in the other. He tracked the man’s weaving progress to where he stood waiting, saw a spasm of fingers against thigh, a fist forming. He recognized it: the prelude to the one and only dance he’d learned as a boy. Being his father’s son, there never did seem to be a shortage of men offering an invitation by way of an open hand laid down on his face like a lash.

That his dance card remained full up year after year didn’t bother him much. He’d always been a firm believer in practice making perfect, whether it applied to pummeling dirt-dusted flesh, or blind aiming a Colt, or to slowly, steadily sinking his fingers knuckles deep into the soft, wet warmth of a willing woman. If it was worth doing, it was worth doing to the best of his fucking ability. 

He’d long ago mastered brutality to hold its reins; he’d been in the presence of Vanessa’s grace, her elegance, long enough to make it his own for this dance. 

He let the man sway closer. Let him curl thick hands, and tuck both blunt thumbs in tight against damp palms, as stocky arms rose on up. Elbows back and out, there was a foolish stretch of chest open as wide as the white sands of the Chihuahuan Desert, and there above it, an Adam’s apple dropping like the sun, if it were roped and hauled down at a fast clip. 

A caw of impatient murmuring sounded to his left. The staccato shuffle of thin-soled boots came from his right. And from the man in front of him, sharp exhalations. One for each weak point, starting right there at his partner’s temple, salted with sweat, going on down to the tense bend of one knee. 

He rolled his shoulders back.

Darting eyes, hard and thin as chipped flint, caught the movement and settled somewhere above it. The man’s lips twisted. He might’ve been looking at that snarl through flawed glass, the way the edges rippled with a fine tremble. The way it shattered when he offered a grin like a flash flood, a quicker wink. 

Fear had its own stench; it drifted to him then like smoke carried from a pyre, and there on top, roaming through the air like some errant blessing was Vanessa’s night flowers. He kept a watch on his partner, but her eyes were for him and only him: a miracle that lit up the expanse of his world, brighter, even, than Victor’s leashed lightning.

Impatience--a moon-strong pull to be nearer to her, to touch the fallen silk of her sleeve--found him just as his partner took the last step forward.

The man’s head slapped back fast, and stopped, suspended at a vicious angle. Blood bubbled at the mouth; fine cracks like lines on sharp knuckles split, spread out along the jaw, beneath unshaven skin. The muffled pistol-bark of fracturing bone faded into spittle-coated cursing and angry jeering before his partner’s body had finished its backwards topple to the ground.

He stepped over splayed legs, unrolling his sleeves, his sights set on the bookmaker: a small man pinched thin by time, with glasses sitting low on the slope of his nose. He held out his hand, exchanged a nod when the payout was laid down. Money for Malcolm, to keep the roof over their heads. He wouldn’t pocket any of the considerable amount; he didn’t need much beyond the clothes on his back, his Colts belted around his hips, and her.

She was there when he turned around, a curl of gathered hair flitting like breeze-blown feathers near her temple. The prettiest, softest shade of a late summer sunrise had bled across her cheeks, her throat. Now that he’d turned his eyes to her, there was no power in any heaven or hell that could compel him to look away.

Vanessa took his clenched hand, the one empty of everything but calluses and scars. She prized it open, aligned her palm with his and held it there for a lingering moment. His rapid pulse mirrored hers, beating through the arteries in their thumbs: hers delicately rounded, his blunt-tipped. She smiled, observing the picture they made, and the predator he was saw its equal in the delighted curve.

She lifted his hand to her cheek, leaned into its shelter.

“Ethan.”

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was an experiment for me: I love writing dialogue, and tend to lean on it; I wanted to see if I could pull off writing something almost entirely stripped of it. Often quiet Ethan provided the perfect opportunity to try it out. (That and I _cherish/love/adore_ Ethan, hence why this fic is so tightly focused on him.) If you read the entire thing, thanks for sitting through the experiment with me! Kudos and comments are always hugely appreciated!
> 
> (Oh, and the title is a lyric from Loreen's "I'm In It With You.")


End file.
